PostgreSQL 10.2 is now available as the latest point release to PostgreSQL 10.

While PostgreSQL 10.0 brought a ton of new features and improvements when released last October, these point releases are focused on just improving the stability and fixes for this popular database system.

In the world of tech, we fit across three generations of contributors to free and open source software–those who were involved in the early days of free software; those who found places in the community after open source had been established; and the group paultag humorously dubbed the GNU generation–none of us have lived in a world without the explicit concept of user freedom.

Within my cadre of FOSS-loving millennials, several of us have fairly similar stories, both inside of our FOSS lives and out: we all had formative life experiences of financial hardship, and tech helped us emerge into comfortable, middle-class lifestyles. We’re all community-focused and have worked as community managers. We’ve been finalists for the same jobs.

That is to say, while we have different opinions and different outlooks, we all come from fairly similar places.

This weekend I spoke at FOSDEM in Brussels to deliver the opening conference keynote. My subject was “The Third Decade of Open Source” and as OSI President I summed up the main events of the last 20 years, some of the key facts behind them and then offered five trends that will shape the next decade.

When the decision was made to follow the label open source, a rift opened up within the free software movement. Classical adherents of the traditional values – Stallman in particular – viewed the Open Source Initiative as pandering to corporate interests, concerned purely with the marketability of the idea, and less with the social and ethical values.

The debate still rages on, in 2016 Richard Stallman posted on the GNU website that “open source misses the point of free software” and that “supporters of open source considered the term a marketing campaign for free software…while not raising issues of right and wrong that they might not like to hear.”

Disagreements aside, the value of open source to the tech industry in the past twenty years is incredible. Fuelling a generation of thinkers and tinkerers and a whirlwind of technological advances, it will continue to grow and shape our digital future.

In an increasingly digitized world, the core values of the movement are ones that we should consider as we move forward.

Taiwanese distributor MayQueen Technologies has gone into the manufacturing business. Its first product is a Panzer industrial box PC. The Panzer features an open source Linux distribution running on a 60 x 46mm HW6UL-Core computer-on-module equipped with NXP’s 540MHz, Cortex-A7 i.MX6 UltraLite (UL) SoC. There’s a product page for the HW6UL-Core module, but at publication time, it was empty. MayQueen also resells the i.MX6-based Pistachio SBC from NutsBoard.org, including both the original dual-core “Lite” version and a quad-core version.

Today is launch day for Sylabs — a new company focused on promoting Singularity within the enterprise and high-performance computing (HPC) environments and on advancing the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), machine/deep learning, and advanced analytics.

And while it's launch day for Sylabs, it's not launch day for the technology it will be promoting. Singularity has already made great strides for HPC and has given Linux itself more prominence in HPC as it has moved more deeply into the areas of scientific and enterprise computing. With its roots at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Singularity is already providing a platform for a lot of heavy-duty scientific research and is expected to move into many other areas, such as machine learning, and may even change the way some difficult analytical problems are approached.

Single sign-on (SSO) solutions are a popular category within the identity and access management (IAM) sector. This is especially true when you look at the fact that SaaS adoption among small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) doubled in 2014, and has quadrupled since 2015 (Blissfully). According to the same report, SMBs use 50+ SaaS products on average, and IT admins have been adopting SSO solutions to help manage user access to these 50+ SaaS applications. However, single sign-on solutions can get extremely pricey, so it’s no wonder that IT organizations are searching for open-source single sign-on alternatives.

Open-source software has an inclusiveness problem that will take some innovative approaches to fix. But, Andrew "bunnie" Huang said in his fast-moving linux.conf.au 2018 talk, if we don't fix it we may find we have bigger problems in the near future. His approach to improving the situation is to make technology more accessible — by enabling people to create electronic circuits on paper and write code for them.

Huang started by asking why we should care about making technology more inclusive. Open-source software gets its power from inclusiveness; that power is so strong that we can (quoting Chris DiBona) claim that, without open-source software, the Internet as we know it would not exist. As an engineer, he thinks that's great, but he has a concern: that means that the user base now include politicians.

In 2015, Google announced it would release its internal tool for developing artificial intelligence algorithms, TensorFlow, a move that would change the tone of how AI research and development would be conducted around the world. The means to build technology that could have an impact as profound as electricity, to borrow phrasing from Google’s CEO, would be open, accessible, and free to use. The barrier to entry was lowered from a Ph.D to a laptop.

I spent the last weekend from Thursday to Sunday in Brussels at the XSF-Summit (here is a very nice post about it by JCBrand) and the FOSDEM. It was really nice to meet all the faces belonging to the JIDs you otherwise only see in the MUCs or on GitHub in real life.

[...]

Ge0rG gave a talk about what’s currently wrong with the XMPP protocol. One suggested improvement was to rely more on Stable and Unique Stanza IDs to improve message identification in various use-cases, so I quickly implemented XEP-0359.

In Digital Health, Open Source Warrants Due Diligence [Ed: FUD. None of this is not applicable to proprietary software where the risks are even greater. Lawyers or law firms can't help reminding us that they're natural enemies of FOSS because they look to just prey on it with their FUD.]

Hans Wennborg announced the availability of LLVM 6.0 RC2 a short time ago. He noted in the brief release announcement, "There's been a lot of merges since rc1, and hopefully the tests are in a better state now."

While initial RISC-V support was added to Linux 4.15, it was only the architecture code and not any device drivers. With Linux 4.16, the RISC-V developers admit this time around they didn't get as many changes in as they were hoping for, but they do have some improvements to land this cycle.

This problem goes back decades and has multiple root causes that culminate in the mess we have today. Hardware and software makers lack liability for flaws, which leads to sub-par rigor in verifying that systems are hardened against known vulnerabilities. A rise in advertising revenue from "big data" encourages firms to hoard information, looking for the right time to cash out their users' information. Privacy violations go largely unpunished in courts, and firms regularly get away with enormous data breaches without paying any real price other than pride.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Open software development has been a resounding success for businesses, in the form of Linux, BSD and the hundreds of interconnected projects for their platforms. These open platforms now account for the lion's share of the market for servers, and businesses are increasingly looking to open software for their client structure as well as for being a low-cost and high-security alternative to Windows and OS X.

From that original definition, the idea of "free" (as in "freedom," not "price") software was born. In part, because of the Open Source Definition, plenty of game-changing software has been developed. However, even before the Open Source Definition came into being, there was Richard Stallman, who launched the GNU Project, aimed at creating an operating system free from source code restraints. In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools. Eight years after that, Eric S. Raymond would go on to publish The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which was a detailed analysis of the hacker community as it pertains to free software principles. It was Raymond's publication that led Netscape to release their Navigator browser as free software.

The ownCloud-forked Nextcloud software for file hosting and communication is out with their latest major release.

Nextcloud 13 is a big release with improvements to the user-interface, end-to-end encryption support is available as a tech preview, much better performance, new collaboration capabilities, Nextcloud Talk is available for built-in audio/video/text communication, and a wide range of other work has taken place over the last nine months.

Deutsche Bank has taken a second step in its open source odyssey, making software code publicly available designed to help firms better understand their IT environments.

[...]

Waltz is the second major batch of code Deutsche Bank has made public as part of its new commitment to open source. Late last year, over 150,000 lines of code - known as 'Plexus Interop' - from its electronic trading platform Autobahn was put into the public domain.

A consortium including the Drugs for Neglected Disease initiative has launched a groundbreaking open source drug discovery project as way to find new drugs to treat mycetoma, a “devastating disease for which current treatments are ineffective, expensive, and toxic,” the group said.

According to a paper laying out the “open pharma” drug development concept, “There are many potential advantages of an open source approach, such as improved efficiency, the quality and relevance of the research, and wider participation by the scientific and patient communities; a blend of traditional and innovative financing mechanisms will have to be adopted.”

SiFive, the leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP, launched the industry’s first Linux-capable RISC-V based processor SoC. The company demonstrated the first real-world use of the HiFive Unleashed board featuring the Freedom U540 SoC, based on its U54-MC Core IP, at the FOSDEM open source developer conference on Saturday.

During the session, SiFive provided updates on the RISC-V Linux effort, surprising attendees with an announcement that the presentation had been run on the HiFive Unleashed development board. With the availability of the HiFive Unleashed board and Freedom U540 SoC, SiFive has brought to market the first multicore RISC-V chip designed for commercialization, and now offers the industry’s widest array of RISC-V based Core IP.

The growth of the World Wide Web has transformed the process of copying digital files from an onerous task requiring the swapping of data carriers (tape-to-tape copying anyone?) to one where digital files are only ever a few commands away or are delivered automatically without user interaction. While this has made life easier in many respects, disruption on this scale also presents challenges. The music industry, for example, has spent millions trying to solve the resulting unauthorised copying issues.

Prague is a beautiful city and you can bet that the city will be crowded during the openSUSE Conference. Hotels are already starting to fill up, so it’s best to take a look at the hotels we recommend now before all the hotels are booked out.

There are six hotels that are recommended, but feel free to book at other hotels in the city. The section for recommended lodging on the openSUSE Conference 2018 webpage gives options for hotels as low as 40 EUR a night to above 120 EUR. Each listing on the section gives a little info about the hotel.

FSF executive director John Sullivan delivered the talk "Freedom Embedded: Devices that Respect Users and Communities" in January 2018, at LinuxConfAu 2018. In this talk, John explains the FSF's certification program called “Respects Your Freedom” (RYF) that awards a certification mark to hardware meeting a set of free software standards (fsf.org/ryf).

One of the most respected technical conferences to be held in Australasia is coming to Christchurch.

Between 500-800 delegates from around Australasia and the world will meet in the city in 2019 for linux.conf.au. It will be the 20th anniversary of the annual conference, which will run from 21-25 January 2019 at the University of Canterbury.

GStreamer core developer Tim-Philipp Müller has provided some insight about some current and upcoming happenings for the GStreamer multimedia framework project. He also addressed the recurring comment of "write it in Rust!" for better security/safety/reliability.

MySQL 8.0 should presumably appear this year although no public release date has been set. At last weekend's FOSDEM conference in Brussels were many talks about developers and database administrators eager for MySQL 8.0, well, at least for those not on the MariaDB bandwagon.

Gentoo Linux participated with a stand during this year's FOSDEM 2018, as has been the case for the past several years. Three Gentoo developers had talks this year, Haubi was back with a Gentoo-related talk on Unix?

Arch Linux Trusted Users, Developers and members of the Security team have been at FOSDEM. Next year there will be more stickers hopefully and maybe a talk, but it was great to meet some Arch users in real life, discuss and even hack on the Security Tracker.

While a real butler will cost you a fortune in wages, digital assistants are cheap and plentiful – and with names almost as archaic as Jeeves, to boot. Alexa, Bixby, Cortana, Siri and Google Assistant all want your business, but there’s a reason the prices are so tempting: each is backed by a massive company very keen to tempt you into its ecosystem for targeted advertising, direct sales or general company revenue.

This week’s crowdfund is different: a smart speaker that has a refreshing desire not to sell at you. Alphr readers, meet Mycroft.

More in Tux Machines

Linux: To recurse or not

Linux and recursion are on very good speaking terms. In fact, a number of Linux command recurse without ever being asked while others have to be coaxed with just the right option. When is recursion most helpful and how can you use it to make your tasks easier? Let’s run through some useful examples and see.

today's leftovers

MX Linux Review of MX-17. MX-17 is a cooperative venture between the antiX and former MEPIS Linux communities. It’s XFCE based, lightning fast, comes with both 32 and 64-bit CPU support…and the tools. Oh man, the tools available in this distro are both reminders of Mepis past and current tech found in modern distros.

Samsung stopped the distribution of the Android 8.0 Oreo operating system update for its Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones due to unexpected reboots reported by several users.
SamMobile reported the other day that Samsung halted all Android 8.0 Oreo rollouts for its Galaxy S8/S8+ series of Android smartphones after approximately a week since the initial release. But only today Samsung published a statement to inform user why it stopped the rollouts, and the cause appears to be related to a limited number of cases of unexpected reboots after installing the update.

The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

A few days back I reported on Intel Icelake patches for the i965 Mesa driver in bringing up the OpenGL support now that several kernel patch series have been published for enabling these "Gen 11" graphics within the Direct Rendering Manager driver. This Icelake support has been quick to materialize even with Cannonlake hardware not yet being available.

Introduced as part of LunarG's recent Vulkan SDK update is the VLF, the Vulkan Layer Factory.
The Vulkan Layer Factory aims to creating Vulkan layers easier by taking care of a lot of the boilerplate code for dealing with the initialization, etc. This framework also provides for "interceptor objects" for overriding functions pre/post API calls for Vulkan entry points of interest.